Attention and awareness are two tightly coupled processes that have been the subject of the same enduring debate: Are they allocated in a discrete or in a graded fashion? Using the attentional blink paradigm and mixture modeling analysis, here we show that awareness arises at central stages of information processing in an ‘all-or-none’ manner: Manipulating the temporal delay between two targets affected the likelihood of consciously perceiving the second target, but did not affect the precision of this percept. Furthermore, these results held across stimulus categories and paradigms, and they were dependent on participants allocating attention to the first target. The findings distinguish the fundamental contributions of attention and awareness at central stages of visual cognition: Conscious perception emerges in a quantal manner, with attention serving to modulate the probability that representations reach awareness.

A longstanding debate in working memory (WM) is whether information is maintained in a central, capacity-limited storage system or whether there are domain-specific stores for different modalities. This question is typically addressed by determining whether concurrent storage of 2 different memory arrays produces interference. Prior studies using this approach have shown at least some cost to maintaining 2 memory arrays that differed in perceptual modalities. However, it is not clear whether these WM costs resulted from competition for a central, capacity-limited store or from other potential sources of dual-task interference, such as task preparation and coordination, overlap in representational content (e.g., object vs. space based), or cognitive strategies (e.g., verbalization, chunking of the stimulus material in a higher order structure). In the present study we assess dual-task costs during the concurrent performance of a visuospatial WM task and an auditory object WM task when such sources of interference are minimized. The results show that performance of these 2 WM tasks are independent from each another, even at high WM load. Only when we introduced a common representational format (spatial information) to both WM tasks did dual-task performance begin to suffer. These results are inconsistent with the notion of a domain-independent storage system, and suggest instead that WM is constrained by multiple domain-specific stores and central executive processes. Evidently, there is nothing intrinsic about the functional architecture of the human mind that prevents it from storing 2 distinct representations in WM, as long as these representations do not overlap in any functional domain.

Experiments were performed to examine the topography of covert visual attention signals in human superior colliculus (SC), both across its surface and in its depth. We measured the retinotopic organization of SC to direct visual stimulation using a 90° wedge of moving dots that slowly rotated around fixation. Subjects (n = 5) were cued to perform a difficult speed-discrimination task in the rotating region. To measure the retinotopy of covert attention, we used a full-field array of similarly moving dots. Subjects were cued to perform the same speed-discrimination task within a 90° wedge-shaped region, and only the cue rotated around fixation. High-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, 1.2 mm voxels) data were acquired throughout SC. These data were then aligned to a high-resolution T1-weighted reference volume. The SC was segmented in this volume so that the surface of the SC could be computationally modeled and to permit calculation of a depth map for laminar analysis. Retinotopic maps were obtained for both direct visual stimulation and covert attention. These maps showed a similar spatial distribution to visual stimulation maps observed in rhesus macaque and were in registration with each other. Within the depth of SC, both visual attention and stimulation produced activity primarily in the superficial and intermediate layers, but stimulation activity extended significantly more deeply than attention.

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